As part of its ongoing work in biomonitoring, Environment Canada’s Canadian Aquatic Biomonitoring Network (CABIN) program has assembled an expert-verified reference collection of 3864 specimens of 604 species of Canadian freshwater macroinvertebrates. Such collections are a key resource for developing a deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) barcode library to facilitate molecular identification of biomon...

BACKGROUND Within the past 3 years, four major evaluations of bisphenol A (BPA) safety have been undertaken. However, these assessments have arrived at quite different conclusions regarding the safety of BPA at current human exposure levels. OBJECTIVES We compared the reasons provided by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) BPA risk assessment panel for their conclusion that human exposu...

Water quality agencies and scientists are increasingly adopting standardized sampling methodologies because of the challenges associated with interpreting data derived from dissimilar protocols. Here, we compare 13 protocols for monitoring streams from different regions and countries around the globe. Despite the spatially diverse range of countries assessed, many aspects of bioassessment struc...

The effects of pesticides on the general population, largely as a result of dietary exposure, are unclear. Adopting an organic diet appears to be an obvious solution for reducing dietary pesticide exposure and this is supported by biomonitoring studies in children. However, results of research into the effects of organic diets on pesticide exposure are difficult to interpret in light of the man...

BACKGROUND Environmental biomonitoring data provide one way to examine race/ethnicity and income-related exposure disparity and identify potential environmental justice concerns. METHODS We screened U.S. National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) 2001-2008 biomonitoring data for 228 chemicals for race/ethnicity and income-related disparity. We defined six subgroups by race/ethn...

The word biomarker is being used more frequently during the last decade. Currently, a great amount of research is directed to fnd toxicological biomarkers for several different chemical substances, since persons are more exposed now than decades before. For this reason, it is important to perform a biomonitoring of such substances in order to assess the possibility that low quantities could cau...

The environmental distribution of fluorinated organic compounds (FOCs) has been less well described than the other halogenated hydrocarbons such as chlorinated and brominated compounds. This is despite the fact that FOCs have been used in a wide variety of products and applications for more than 50 years. FOCs are resistant to hydrolysis, photolysis, microbial degradation, or metabolism by vert...

Mercury contamination of wildlife populations has been documented widely in recent years as biomonitoring has become an important tool for assessing environmental contamination. Avian eggs provide an ideal assay material for Hg biomonitoring, particularly when the collection of eggs is simplified by using cavity-nesting species that nest in easily monitored nest boxes. However, studies are need...

Environmental DNA (eDNA) can be defined as the DNA pool recovered from an environmental sample that includes both extracellular and intracellular DNA. There has been a significant increase in the number of recent studies that have demonstrated the possibility to detect macroorganisms using eDNA. Despite the enormous potential of eDNA to serve as a biomonitoring and conservation tool in aquatic ...

Biological Monitoring is a newly published book whose chief aim is to provide an overview on the current knowledge of biological monitoring by evaluating the quality of ecosystems and human health. The book, edited and mostly written by Marcelo Enrique Conti, is composed of seven relatively dense chapters that deal mostly with monitoring ecosystem changes that result from environmental insults....